Utter Lows: The Treatments of Marty Rantzen (Slaughter High Story)
by Quillon42
Summary: I had two ideas for a possible alternate real life outside of Marty Rantzen's demented dreams, as embodied by most of the 1986 film Slaughter High. I could not decide between them, so I made the first chapter here an unpleasant reality, and the second chapter a pleasant one. (SPOILERS: Shirley, you may recall, is the girl from the bathtub; Nancy is the girl from the cesspool).
1. Chapter 1: The Unhappy Reunion

UTTER LOWS: THE TREATMENTS OF MARTY RANTZEN

By Quillon42

CHAPTER ONE: THE UNHAPPY REUNION

The way he saw it happening just instants ago, Marty was in the same old bed, in the same old bandages. Then when it came time for his daily shot…the nerd and that literally needling nurse had spontaneously switched positions, with him on his feet of a sudden, and she ever so still on the mattress. The syringe had changed hands in this turnabout as well, so that the sedative, that old prick which put him to sleep could now be shoved straight into the eye of that quack, the other old prick who always put him to frigging sleep…

_[DOOM…DOOM…DOOM…DOOM…DOOM…DOOM…DOOM…DOOM…DOOM…DOOM…DOOM… DOOM…]_

With blaring bells the chiming of the clock brought him back, as it always did, striking twelve noon the same way it would when it ended April Fool's hijinks on any British First of April. It was his birthday, it was for Martin Rantzen, age twenty-nine as of today…but he was in the same effing place that he'd been for the past dozen years.

And it had been getting worse as he grew older, especially given that not only had those bullying pieces of shit, those empty expenditures of flesh, those fuckers whose tricks put the young man here, those nothings had not only had grown up and become very definitive somethings of themselves…

…a couple of them came back to him now, to haunt him, to put him in an even worse place than anything that could have been cooked up at Doddsville High.

"Everything is in place, Marty…_so alright, letttttttttt's goooooooooo!"_

He felt it again, all of a sudden, the jerking upward that he imagined in his nocturnal emission of a dream, the hang-hoisting that he envisioned had happened to that shitpiece Skippy Pollock who was the taskmaster of his torment back at the School. Now the rope, it was wrapping around the neck of the nerd himself, catching him abruptly by the throat but not cutting off his air somehow, not curtailing his existence as he so wished it would have by this point, thrusting his spindly body upward.

As his ninety-five-pound frame flew from Level B2 to B1 again, for what must have been the three hundredth time with no exaggeration, the same inflection of that cute, smallish Italo-Asian girl—whom he also recalled and rued, all those years back, that same voice sounded once more.

"The dream readings we monitored last night show us you still haven't learned, and probably never will," she said, as the overgrown child of a chap found himself coming up through the oversized Super-Mario-like piping and looming once more over that damn tub.

"Going for Doctor Minasian's eye again with the syringe; I mean, _really…_"

The hangline hurried him up to a position directly above the cleansing container. The voice explaining, the voice berating…it belonged to another Doddsville alum; specifically it was Shirley, the exotic half-pint who wasn't nearly the one most up in his face when all those guys had ganged up on him…hadn't been the one to prod him with the javelin…hadn't been the one to hush his head into such a smaller, more septic cleansing container…

…but still she held the camera back then, still was one of those responsible for capturing it all on film.

And here she was now…the lady still chronicling it all, and cackling on through and through.

The child-man was clunked down now into the width of the tub, his flesh once again as full as it could be upon his scrawny skeleton, he facing the faucet again, those same handles he'd seen Shirley turning in his visions…Marty now cringing at what would come forth from them, come for him as they did for her in what his subconscious had imagined…

"I tell you, Skippy was pretty sharp to catch what you were concocting back in the day…all his sneaking around, he'd never thought he would come upon something like the scheme you had hatched."

Now the right knob started to revolve, slowly, causing the most everyday droplets of water to spring forth. The fluid pooled along the bottom of the tub, coursing till it surrounded the unclothed Marty all around his nether areas.

"Who would have thought that the 'Two Four Six…Triglyceride' whatever the hell you were composing, back in the School's Lab…who'd a thunk it was the essential ingredient for a private-school-pulverizing…building-leveling explosive."

The water now was lukewarm, just as Marty liked it. Yet it felt more unsettling than the effects of any horseplay to which he was most forcefully subjected in his secondary school career.

"Honestly, Mister Rantzen…what we thought back then was trickery…turned out to be a salvation of serendipity, for us all. None of us—including you, of course, you recklessly suicidal _fuck_—would be here on this earth today if it weren't for what Skip found in your writings.

"You're going to find your daily bath to be as…bubbly as it's always been.

"But know that, each and every time…the pain never gets any easier to take."

The too-old of a boy shrieked again as the brownish fluid—the same which shot out of that inevitable Chekhov's pistol of a bottle placed precariously atop those shelves in the lab…the same which bathed his face amidst all the burners he endeavored so desperately to quell back on that bitch of a birthday…the same which he dreamt had poured out of the faucet, to dissolve Miss Shirley itself—

-it was gushing down, sneezing out of the bath's nose to smother Marty himself now.

As that selfsame acid now caressed, covered, coated Marty all over, searing and burning him so much more, from within as well as without—and so much more completely than he ever was, on the floor of that chemistry lab conflagration…

"And the suds never get any easier to shake."

The thick Mediterrasian accent of the tiny lady rang, reverberated through the liquefying ears of the Doddsville Dork, her words pounding into him, permeating even more than the solution which was changing him swiftly from solid to liquid, summarily ushered his stripling self from lining the base of the bathtub to tippling down its drain, first his melted legs and then the matter that was once his torso, then all else following.

When Marty's eyes began to slip down the spout—the peepers still blinking with fried, frayed eyelids…

"_It's time to confess to the Priestess…"_

It sounded again, that same strange line, the same one he always heard from the demure diminutive lady, larking from above, his fractured, fragmented freak-frame now falling down, down into that same cesspool from which he started from his dream.

There she waited, once again, not the auburn-tressed enemy from above but now the honey-haired maiden whom he pursued only so slightly in his dream, the one who took it upon herself, honestly on her own volition, to trip over into that septic tank, then assay in vain to climb out, with Marty's sneaker pushing her back when she almost made it out—which of course equated to her utterly inescapable, instantaneous demise.

For Marty here, however, there was not the business of death, but rebirth—as the dissolution he endured but a minute into the past was to be undone through recomposition in this septic subbasement.

Perhaps it would be a reason for the outcast to rejoice, given that the boy was getting his body back. If only said recomposition did not involve an assemble by way of sewage, a resurrection through excrement.

"Don't start and stir as if you aren't familiar with the drill," the half-pint's inflection continued to plague through the PA down here, while the beauteous fretful blonde from the boy's Doddsville past began to attend to the pool of poop. The disembodied, blinking eyes of Marty Rantzen flicked over to see the Priestess herself once again—the one known as Nancy, who always wore that annoying tennis visor back in the day, as if any obfuscating headwear could begin to hide the shame and reprehensibility of what she and the nine other fuckers did to him back then.

Priestess Nancy and Overseeress Shirley here, they were the ones who deserved the punishment. Not Marty. Just like his dreams—it should have been _them,_ and the other Doddsville detritus of douche who hurt him. Should have been they, who traumatized him, who subjected him to all those utter lows back in the day, who were set to suffer in the now.

They who thwarted him, and all his schemes back in the day. What he had planned, for the school, for the municipal offices in the state in which he lived, for all his targets beyond that…it was all so glorious, and it was all despoiled by piddling pranks.

He could feel his face now, its pallid planes grafting back together shakily, thanks to so many heaped helpings of human waste all around. The shit then moulded his shoulders; the feces formed his torso otherwise. As his legs formulated from logs of stool otherwise, the Priestess above smiled.

Inwardly, so did Marty. This was the best part of this constant, recurring cycle. Now, for about an hour and fifteen or so, the child-creep could recede back into his demented delirium, in which he picked off each of those who harmed him in so many ways. Now in his subconscious, he could send out the invitations, and make the piercing, electrifying, and acidic arrangements all over again for his reviled reunion guests at Doddsville.

In the furthest part of the back of his mind, though, Marty knew well who was reveling all the more. He could see this in the Priestess's eyes as she shot a gleeful, cruel glance at him while he was going under once again. He could realize it, hatefully and helplessly, while the Overseeress announced, over the loudspeaker, that unspeakably insipid and uninspired line, delivered in a manner as unconvincing as ever, yet somehow inexplicably endearing as well, as the pernicious nerd lost consciousness anew in the steaming, acrid cesspool:

"Come on, guy, _let's par-teeeeeeeeee!"_

(NEXT CHAPTER: THE HAPPY REUNION)


	2. Chapter 2: The Happy Reunion

UTTER LOWS: THE TREATMENTS OF MARTY RANTZEN

By Quillon42

CHAPTER TWO: THE HAPPY REUNION

Again the same, small lovely lady started with the cloying come-on to the boy, as the latter lay still and supine in the place he perceived as putrid:

_"Alllllright, letttttttttt's goooooooooo!"_

Marty was being lifted up again, the boy again feeling the noose nursing, then gnawing at his neck as it yanked him up once again from what he perceived to be a pool of poo and other untoward items emanating from the basest aspects of the human condition.

On either side of the young man and well outside of his harried head, the pleasant attendant and the kindly psychotherapist grabbed an arm and led the young man gently, once more, from the basin to the bath.

It was just moments ago that Nurse Nancy was doing all she could to make Marty as comfortable as could be, in the sauna. Nothing risqué, of course; just innocently exposing the young man to thermotherapy treatments which both she and her colleague, the psychotherapist Shirley (known as "Shrink Shirley" to the majority of the facility), had hoped would shock the guy out of an endless loop of lunacy.

Both women monitored the young man's dreams very carefully. They could tell he was ever so troubled—even though they could not read exactly what was occurring in the concourse of Marty's subconscious, as they might have been able to in the more occultish, earlier chapter's reality. Here the girls watched, relatively helplessly, as Marty tossed and turned and tossed his cookies, in time, even, as the periods of his sleep waxed and waned between slightly fitful to seriously frenetic.

Despite the fact that progress seemed to be discouragingly negligible after all this time, the ladies endeavored unceasingly at their mission nonetheless. After all, this Marty was certainly worth saving—and both Nancy and Shirley dedicated their lives to making it happen someday.

See, here too, Martin Rantzen worked hard in his secondary salad days to make his "Two Four Six Triglyceride" whatever. But whereas the earlier chapter's chap aimed to utilize the ingredient to effect an explosive…this Marty wanted to apply it towards the hopeful end of an epidemic.

A certain disease had developed in the American population, here—one which killed within mere days at best, and hours at worst. Marty had known all about it, as there were three in his rather obscure bloodline which had contracted and fallen tragically to it in the past few months. He was working furiously at a cure, for his own sake of course, but also honestly to provide a boon for those afflicted at large. It was his heartful hope that this "Two Four Six" would be, at last, the component he required to perfect the panacea.

Then Skip happened, and the wreckage of results that came about from his meddling.

When school authorities discovered what it was that the nerdy yet earnest scientist was trying to come up with, they made it public, to shame those who hazed the outcast, to punish them far worse than any cruel gym coach ever could with calisthenics. Word was that Skip had almost even offed himself, the douche became so despondent over what he had done. Others, even those in his own group, had even turned to bullying the Skipper for his unwitting thwarting of Marty's efforts.

Nancy and Shirley were two of the only ones who didn't aggress against their old acquaintance. They focused their energies, rather, on finding a way to bring the boy back.

He was at present foundering deep, deep in a passive-aggressive sort of resentment-resignation, and Nurse and Shrink were determined to bring him back from that brink. They tried again and again, bouncing between the extremes of blistering thermotherapy in the sauna, then shivering cryotherapy in the spa. His demented mind impenetrable, Marty interpreted the former treatment subconsciously as a sensation not unlike permeation by so many droppings and ploppings collected in a septic tank—with his brain reacting in turn through a fantasy in which Nancy was ever so succulently, feculently submerged. It got the catatonic patient off thoroughly in his sleep to imagine the woman herself covered in the shit and other sewage that he could so surely sense was shifting all over his skin, in the midst of that basin while the Nurse in reality was doing all she could to help him with calm, comforting lappings of warm, clean water.

Similarly, when Shirley tamped down on the temperature in the spa, upstairs from Nancy's own thermal turf, the freezing cold clasped at Marty, almost bit and ate away at him, made him envision immersion in the most corrosive compounds imaginable. Something not unlike the nitric which crushed into his face when the teetering brown bottle finally crashed down, all those years back. Yet here it was much more frigid, made him imagine the coldness of the spray of water he underwent in the showers, he openly exposed to them all in the girls' locker room.

In turn, the adult boy wished deep within that one of them could experience that same awkwardness, that same unnerving nakedness, that same April Fool's utter low. So internally he saw Shirley one second waist-up in beads and a blouse, then the next moment her visage in blood, then her image encumbered by none of these.

And she would slip into that tub in the utter nude—and then eventually fail to emerge, but rather submerge, lacking even her shimmering Eurasian skin…

…but now, at this instant, it was he who was burning, he who was suffering the searing, in the bathtub, Marty Rantzen and no one else who felt the liquid lap and lash and lay waste to his flesh. It must have rended the dermis from his very face, the way he visualized it happening, almost in stop-motion, to the Shrink herself. He could almost even see in his mind's eye the awful skull into which his features must have fallen away by now.

By the spa, at the grown boy's side, the Shrink shuddered once more at Marty's resistance, she knowing with full confidence that he could never hurt anyone, as far receded as he was into himself after all of these years.

For the sake of humankind, though, both she and Nancy had to keep trying.

Shirley turned the right knob again, introducing more glacially-cold water into the tub. As she did this, she whispered gently, tenderly into Marty's ear that unspeakably insipid and uninspired line, delivered in a manner as unconvincing as ever, yet somehow inexplicably endearing as well, as the pitiful nerd maintained his continuous unconsciousness in the therapeutic vessel:

"Come on, guy, _let's par-teeeeeeeeee!"_

AFTERWORD

(SPOILERS FOR _SLAUGHTER HIGH_ ALSO)

If you haven't seen _Slaughter High_, you might want to do so. It's extremely craptacular, and I will admit, or even affirm, that by the end of my first viewing of it I said to myself, "God, that was awful." But it was awful in a train-wreck sort of way, in which you abhorred it but couldn't look away, or really here, you couldn't resist but give it another chance, as cheap and as trite as it came off the first time at least and such.

I must say I fell particularly for Josephine Scandi, the actress who played Shirley (yes, the one who died in the bathtub), she has heretofore only acted in a couple of feature films, and appears to be, as per her stage name and real name, as well as some info I found on her through literally a couple minutes of searching on Google (I'm not a creepy stalker about her, okay?!) that she is of Italian or of Asian or of both origins by descent. And no, I didn't dig her because of the bathtub scene—honestly I just dug her because I thought she was mega-cute in the film. Her "Let's par-teeeeee" line is actually in the film's trailer, even (you can see the trailer on Youtube as several accounts have it up), and as I say in the story, the line is insipid and uninspired—and her delivery of the line sort of encapsulates, actually, how terrible the acting is in the film generally—but I don't know, it's kind of endearing too, the way she says it. Maybe I'm just infatuated; I don't know.

In any case, Scandi/Shirley was kind of apart from everyone else in the movie, as her lines/actions really just served to move the plot along (for example, she's the one who opens Marty's locker with the rat inside), and she had no real connections to any of the other characters, other than belonging to their clique per se. In contrast, like, the Joe/Frank/Stella thing was a love triangle, Carol and Susan were either very close friends or sisters, and so forth.

Look, I'm really not trying to overly psychoanalyze a cheesy Eighties horror film, which is arguably as shallow as cinematic depth can be in terms of how much weight a film can carry. It's just that Miss Scandi just kind of grabbed me a little with her presence in the film, that's all. Her death was certainly memorable as well—beyond the nudity and such, with the viciousness of the acid and all. The other death which stuck in my mind was Nancy's, as she died in the cesspool/septic tank. I actually looked up cesspools and their history online a bit after watching, and people actually have died in them. Just like it's not necessarily the fire that can kill a person, but the smoke, in a conflagration…in a cesspool, it's not the crap that does it, but the toxic fumes. Long Island has been infamous for people falling into cesspools and dying. It's that crappy of a place. (Literally!)

(And figuratively!)

But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this story, and again if you haven't seen _Slaughter High_, give it a chance, as it has its moments and images that will stick in your mind, I think, in a fun way. It's relatively underrated and worth a look in my opinion.


End file.
